Tag Archive for love

Is your business site representative of your business at its very best? Are you proud of it and know it is your absolutely best effort and you couldn’t have done better if you tried – because you did try?

Maybe, sadly, your business website is holding you back. It is not far-fetched to think that your online representation of your business could be holding you back. Look at what is out there! There are thousands of online business horror-shows out there – destroying their brand with junk websites.

Even if you have one issue that isn’t professional or doesn’t work – it is too much. How many times have you been given the impression a form works and you spend a good 10-30 minutes typing hard-thought information into it – only to see the error page spitting back nonsense immediately after you hit “Send”? How quick can that put an end to that customer contacting you? Pretty quick.

Here are some of the basics that many web developers and business owners get wrong. Fix these up and then take a very detailed look at your business website. Verify every photo loads, every mp3 plays, every link works, and every page is found. Test your forms, videos, and test your site in different browsers and on computers with different screen resolutions. Did you ever see your site on a Mac? You should. Likewise you should check to see how your site looks in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera browsers. What about on the iPhone, iPod or iPad?

Many mobile phone users are spending money from their phone one websites. Is it a possibility that yours offer something they might want to buy? It is something to think about… so many things to think about!

Here are some must-do’s to help you sell more, be more professional, and grow your business. Do them and then get to work – there is probably a lot more that needs done.

1. Supercharge it! Google has recently come out and said that slow sites will be penalized with less love than those that have fast sites. How fast does your site need to be? Nobody knows or is telling. It is a good idea to speed up your site considerably so you’re in the fastest 50 percentile anyway, according to the performance indicator in Google’s Webmaster Tools dashboard. Clean house and get rid of large Flash files other files that load as soon as a visitor comes to your site.

Shrink sizes of your photos and videos. For images – Xat (.com) is an amazing tool. For your video, using mp4 files with h.264 compression helps considerably. It is the web standard for high quality and smaller file sizes. Can you get away with 320×240 resolution video instead of larger sizes you use? Try it and find out.

Consider moving your site to a VPS – virtual private server, which is cost effective and rock solid at companies like Knownhost and HostGator. Godaddy shared hosting is quite slow in comparison, and you can’t risk being slow if your business website is to be the best it can be.

2. Hire a Copywriter. These folks are worth their weight in PayPal cash. The good ones make millions per year just in choosing the words to use to sell products and services for companies. Is there a more important topic on your business website than your products and services? If there is I haven’t heard about it yet. Trust this job to professionals. Yes, you’ll pay for it – have samples done first and see how they convert on a couple of products before you entrust the whole project to someone. Once you find a good copywriter the sun is going to shine on your site just a little bit more than it used to. Trust me on this.

3. Smoother Sales Steps. When your sales move smoothly, they do well. Buy your own products and see where the sticky points are. Does something not make sense? Better yet, give your credit card to someone clueless about your products. Tell them to buy one of everything. It is crucial to know what your customers are seeing -and to improve the sales flow as much as possible. Flow of the sales process is every bit as important as the copywriting process, and they work hand in hand.

4. Search Engine Optimization – ensuring your business website is optimized as highly as possible for keyword phrases you want to show up for in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is every bit as important as the other steps above, and possibly even more so. Search engines have the power to send giant heaps of visitors to your site. If your copywriting and sales process were both the stuff of nightmares, your SEO could still pull it off and make your business successful all by itself. Yes, it takes effort. Hours. Hundreds of hours. If you don’t have the time – do you have the money to pay a specialist?

Changing your entire business website over to WordPress content management system is a great step to take if you’re desperate for good search engine rankings. WordPress websites are easy to change, add content to, and remove old content from. You don’t need a webmaster in most cases. WordPress sites hand-feed Google updates to your site through using RSS feeds. Get a plugin called All in One SEO at WordPress and half the battle is won. You’ll still need many links from sites related to your niche, pointing to your site to rank highly – but, it is probably possible for you to get in the top 5 of search engine results no matter what niche you’re in – with a 3 year effort.

5. Optimize Forms. Forms on your site are a special object of contention among potential customers of your business. Make the forms short, sweet, functional, and helpful and you’ll have some happy customers. Have train-wreck forms and your business will seriously suffer for it. Take a day or two to decrease the number of fields customers need to fill out on your forms. If signing up email leads just ask for name and email – that’s it. Short and sweeter is better. First-time surfers at your website aren’t comfortable giving you more than basic information in many cases. Don’t ask for too much.

Use these tips to get started optimizing your business presence online. There are hundreds of tasks you could do, but, complete these five and already your site is optimized better than the vast majority of business sites.